 |
| Still from Thumbelina, photo by Robyn Beattie |
“...all the while she was really the loveliest
creature that one could imagine”
--Thumbelina
Thumbelina the poem is live in Issue #1 of the NonBinary
Review—available to download as a Zoetic Press app through iTunes (for viewing on iPad 2 with ios 7 minimum). Or if
you want to hear the poem poured over images, cue up the photo poem montage of Thumbelina Robyn and I put together, accessible on YouTube, featuring Stephen Pryputniewicz (my father) on keyboard with his spare and lovely adaptation of Mort Garson’s Taurus, The Voluptuary from the album
“Cosmic Sounds: celestial counterpoint with words and music” (originally
released in 1967).
Thumbelina, the sprite, remains for me a
tiny harbinger of the time before—as
the saying goes—“innocence was lost”…I must have been about eleven years old,
coloring in the outlines of Thumbelina in my upstairs bedroom in the sleepy town
of Villa Grande on the Russian River. Surrounded by cutouts of the mustached
black and white Purina Cat Chow cats I’d taped to the walls with their silky
angelfish whiskers peering over my shoulder, I lay across a pink bedspread on a white and gold canopy bed I’d inherited from an older girl, my new best friend,
up the street. On her way to high school she’d leave me handwritten notes on my
gatepost….before “it” happened and I had something to hide forever.
Such simple joy—coloring in the flower on which
stood the bare-legged Thumbelina, each petal a different color like Joseph’s
coat of many colors. I was not a mother then. Unaware that the story of the mother
would matter someday. Her loneliness at the end having to let Thumbelina go. More
the idea of daughter than the real
time daughter.
 |
| Photo by Robyn Beattie |
I’m surprised to find, in writing the poem, that girl,
mother, and flower coexist in the imagination alongside an innocence I thought lost, beside a self I thought irreparably fractured. I'm also surprised to discover it takes years to undo
certain misassumptions. Several years ago, I approached a community service agency
about applying for a grant to fund a project focused on using writing to help
rape survivors. One of the staff members casually said something like:
“You know, families come to us absolutely
devastated, thinking they’ll never get over it (sexual trauma to a child or
teen). But of course everyone can, and does, they just need to hear someone say
it with conviction. Of course both the child and the family can heal.”
I nodded as if I knew, “Sure, of course.” But internally, I was elated. No, I didn’t know.
For years I assumed one had to go on, irreversibly damaged. And that the only
option was to cloak and hide carefully enough so others would not divine the broken core "you."
We didn’t get the grant, but I made out like a
bandit with the gold at the end of the conversation’s rainbow with that one
insight. Fast forward a couple of years, at which point I met Saddle
Road Press sister Michelle Wing (author of Body on the Wall). In her I found a kindred spirit, already doing beautiful work with a program she started called Changing Hurt to Hope (which she describes in this interview conducted by Erica Rothberg at The California Journal of Women Writers).
Healing happens with naming, just as pain softens when
witnessed or shrouded. Like the pale white cloth in the still Robyn
and I chose for our movie to accompany Thumbelina’s admonition to her mother, “It still ended with you, childless again
at the window…” I love the image, a veil over the shared fragility and strength
of the mother/daughter bond. Artist Victoria Ayres (creator of the artwork in
that frame) writes in her statement:
In my current work using silk/cotton thread panels and stressed
tissue paper, which overlay the figure and elicit a sense of masking or
covering over, the viewer sees only parts of the image. This work speaks to the
layers of experiences, both painful and affirming, that mold who we are and who
we become over time…
My gratitude, then, for the gift of writing, for the chance to try on viewpoints and imagined incarnations like robes in a closet. And then to shed them.
I suppose Thumbelina reminds us (fairytale mothers and earth mothers alike) that our daughters are neither ours to keep nor give away.
And that we arrive of our own accord, to find our way along a trail littered with
joys and devastations in uneven measure that magic will, god-willing, offset, and on good days, trump.
Notes:
NonBinary Review’s layout for Issue #1: A Grimm Collection of Modern Fairy Tales gives you the option to read the Grimm’s
version as well as contributor versions of Snow White, Little Red Cap,
Cinderella, and the Pied Piper, to name a few. Through July, they are taking submissions based on Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein; the issue after, L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz. Submission guidelines here.
Saddle Road Press sisters Michelle Wing (author of the poetry collection, "Body on the Wall") and Ruth
Thompson (author of the poetry collection, "Woman with Crows") and I will be reading at Moe's Bookstore in Berkeley on Thursday, June
19 at 7:30 p.m. at the invitation of Poetry Flash. Thompson's "Woman With Crows" was
reviewed earlier this week at The California Journal of Women Writers.
Up at Mother Writer Mentor this week,
Lifting the Domestic: A Conversation with Jayne Benjulian in which Benjulian deepens a conversation started at TCJWW about Barbara Rockman's poetry collection, "
Sting and Nest." Benjulian remarks, "To lift the domestic into the poetic is quietly radical..."
Photos of the bird in this post are by
Robyn Beattie, as is the author photo and book cover for
November Butterfly on this poster; book cover design by Don Mitchell.
